Traditionally lighting control desks have been designed around controlling dimmer packs (source controllers) or moving light fixtures. With the advent of affordable red-green-blue (RGB) light emitting diode (LED) fittings, a single dimmer channel is no longer an adequate way of controlling multi-attribute color fixtures, which require manipulation of multiple control channels simultaneously. On conventional lighting desks each light is controlled by a single fader, which gives control over the brightness of that light. Other conventional desks allow grouped channels (fixtures) to be controlled using encoders or syntax commands. These complex desks are designed around the control of multi-attribute moving position light fixtures, not color-changing static fixtures. In both these scenarios (faders or grouped encoders), the user interface and ergonomics are counterintuitive to controlling a single light with only a couple of additional parameters. On a fader-based desk the problem is that the user must learn the sequence of these controls and remember which ones are related to one another; on an encoder-based desk, the encoders do not provide any feedback as to what they are controlling, or the feedback is numerical when a user would often be more familiar with the color they wish to control.
Conventional encoder-based consoles typically offer either a Liquid Crystal Display in proximity to the encoder, or a monitor display which indicates the function of each encoder. Both of these solutions provide a visible, normally written, feedback of the level of the parameter being controlled. These solutions are often clunky and inelegant in their control of linear parameters because the numeric values attributed to linear parameters often bear little relation to the resulting color and therefore the user is left using trial and error to manipulate the parameters as required.